P5B & ATI Success

[galahon]

Only a 2 poster here (but those who read, do less posting)

 

 

I finally had a chance to sit down with a P5b MB, ATI X1950XTX, and a bunch of spare parts. Anyone here knows that with a P5B and Jmicron, that it's almost next to impossible to get the disc to read in the drive for the install. I've tried it several times, and was about ready to give up. It's not too expensive to just buy an external drive, but even cheaper is one of those IDE-USB adapters ($20) Everyone has an extra internal CDR drive kicking about, so its a no brainer with this board.

 

My hard drive for the test is a 4 year old Maxtor 40GIG drive. It's IDE, and I just left it connected to a jmicron IDE port.

 

I used JAS 10.4.8 for this test, and it booted with no problems from my now Internal/external cdr drive. The $20 part works really well. Setup went without a hitch, and I made sure to erase and partition the Maxtor, and decided to use all available space. I also only choose SSE2/3 addons, and NOTHING ELSE. After the system rebooted I was pleased to see my new MAC up and running. At this point I had no sound, network, and really nasty video performance. But everything was working fine, including all usb ports front and back, plus I could see my SATA drive with Vista. My keyboard, mouse, and my memory stick all worked great.

 

JCCOOL's drivers fixed the video card problem. I only ran his installer, and changed nothing else. Card works great

I also found the driver for the network, and sound, and both work very well. Only negitive is that the sound card drivers lack any type of input for MIC, etc.

 

I've tested DVD's, iTunes, etc. No problems. Downloaded a pile of games (Games are great for breaking a computer) and they all worked. Nice and fast too.

 

Since I dont have a real MAC, I made a trip to Best Buy to play with the fastest one they had, but made sure I did some benchmarks on my homebrew mac first. I found that my PC puts a real mac to shame. Load times are easily 25% faster, and even though I only had screen savers and chess to benchmark graphics, I can see slight differances in how fast the board turns while playing chess. I saw tearing on the real mac, but not on mine. Network performance is the same as the store demo. Default webpage loads up in about 3 seconds. CNN.com was 4.5 seconds on mine, and 7 seconds on the best buy machine.

 

Now It's time to upgrade to 10.4.9, but I really cant see why I should, given that this setup is working like a charm, and the patches so far have been risky.